It is a seemingly simple system.

July 16, 2019 6:17 PM

I was PrOtOtYpE, A tranquil web residency for casual investigations into how we (from people to plants) interface with our planetary computer.

There are enough casual online communities in the world. I was a temporary structure. I lasted for 3 months [January 2019 - April 2019], then faded to black. I was never "about a place." Learning Gardens continually attempted to nurture a sense that "dying is OK", in the sense that no learning initiative can remain fervently active, or remain relevant forever. In a sense, we should be happy to realize some gardens can't hold our collective attentions forever.

Yet there are still sublime oases in cyberspace. And what might they look like in the future? For starters, it's certain that the populist enclosures of language are unlikely to be, by chance, the most viable discourse. What is needed is not new technology, but new metaphors: a metalanguage for describing the world that complex systems have wrought. A new shorthand is required, one that simultaneously acknowledges and addresses the reality of a world in which people, politics, culture and technology are utterly enmeshed.

posted by sockermom (2 comments total)

I'm having a hard time orienting myself through the links here to figure out what this about and what it did or did not produce? The first link is the announcement of the 3-month project, which states there were to be biweekly updates and then some kind of livestream of the projects when it closed down in April? And then I don't understand the connection between the links in the last paragraph and the PrOtOtYpE project. Maybe this post wasn't meant for me and I was supposed to keep scrolling, and sorry if this feels like threadshitting, but I haven't felt this stupid and clueless in a long time.
posted by drlith at 8:09 PM on July 16, 2019

Sorry, thats from how I framed the post, and is my own limitation. The last two links are conceptually related to the transient projects in the first two links, by extending the question of what a "cyberspace oasis" might look like. The first link in the second paragraph is a related project, by someone who was also involved in the Prototype project.

I have nothing to do with any of this (I was looking through the bookmarks on my computer and found a link that eventually led me to Prototype, which then led me to the rest of the links here). As far as I can tell there is not one material thing that was produced, but different people did make different material things as part of Prototype. I posted it to Metafilter because I thought that there were some interesting generative ideas in these links that could spark discussion, like about how playing with temporality might create opportunities for specific types of knowledge production in groups, for example, or about the dichotomy of centralization and decentralization as it relates to governance structures.
posted by sockermom at 8:31 PM on July 16, 2019 [1 favorite]